Reresby Sitwell

Things he did: worked in advertising and P.R.; operated a vending-machine business; planted a vineyard at his house in England, at the time the northern-most wine-producing vineyard in the world.

Why I’m writing this: Sir Reresby was the only son of Sacheverell Sitwell, and thus the only issue of the three Sitwell siblings, whose fame has mostly been extinguished, but who before the Second World War were among the most celebrated Bohemian writers in England. This is all summarized pretty well in D. J. Taylor’s recent “Bright Young People.” But it’s elaborated on even better in Sacheverell’s brother Osbert’s memoir, “Right Hand, Left Hand,” which is out of print in the U.S. (Let’s go, NYRB!)

The life was the work, mostly, for the Sitwells, and though they left the aforementioned reminiscence, a few middling novels, and some poetry—Edith was the most prominent poet, while Sachie was probably the least—their greatest talent was that shared by many interwar aristocrats: they really knew how to épater les bourgeois. Edith described herself as “an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish,” and that seems about right.

I admire the Sitwells for their collective resistance to mortification, but also for the adaptability and ease of their prose, which they shared with contemporaries like Harold Nicholson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West.

Sachie was the most normal of the trio—Osbert considered his marriage and fatherhood a giant betrayal—and Reresby was more conventional still. He limited his literary output to a book about Mount Athos and another about Renishaw Hall, the Sitwell house Reresby inherited from his uncle in 1965. But he wasn’t completely free of eccentricity: signs on his lawn directed at unwanted visitors, instead of warning of dogs, read, “Please do not trespass as it will annoy Mr Sitwell’s snakes.”